Microsoft’s efforts to make its Microsoft Teams more power efficient have reached an important new milestone. The company claims that it has optimized the Microsoft Teams app on Windows to reduce power consumption by up to 50% during resource-intensive use cases such as Teams calls and meetings.
This journey to make Microsoft Teams on Windows more power efficient started in 2020, right when Microsoft Teams usage literally exploded due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. That’s when it became critically important for Microsoft to provide a consistent Teams meetings and calling experience across all devices.
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“We’re committed to ensuring great calling and meeting experiences for users on low-end hardware as well as those on high-end workstations and high-resolution monitors. One of the factors we’ve addressed is the difference in power requirements for different customer profiles by ensuring Teams meetings are as energy-efficient as possible, regardless of setup,” explained Microsoft’s Robert Aichner, Principal Group Program Manager at Microsoft’s Intelligent Communication and Conversation Cloud (IC3) group.
The first big milestone in this journey to optimize power consumption in Microsoft Teams was when the app received hardware and video capture optimisation back in October 2020, which reduced CPU load when Teams is using the camera during meetings. Improvements to video rendering last year further reduced power consumption, especially now that the Microsoft Teams can now leverage a device’s GPU to improve performance.
“Looking forward, we’ll continue to work closely with CPU and GPU chipset vendors to ensure the next generation of silicon is further optimized for Teams video conferencing,” Aichner said yesterday. If Microsoft Teams is getting new features at a regular pace, Aichner also emphasized that his team is making sure that new experiences are “optimized for all users, regardless of their network and devices.”
dftf
<p>For an app like <em>Teams</em>, I would hazard a guess it likely won’t use the GPU to do any of the video-rendering, it’s probably 100% CPU-decoded. Assuming you have no-other apps open that would use video, next-time you have a <em>Teams</em> video-conference, open <em>Task Manager</em> and head to the <em>Performance </em>tab and see if your GPU is showing any movement or not</p>
dftf
<p>(Also, assuming it <em>is </em>CPU-decoded only, I wonder if it does so multi-threaded or single-threaded? You’d be surprised how many parts of apps thesedays still only operate on a single-thread, given even on low-end CPUs they are all mostly quad-core minimum as-standard now…)</p>
dftf
<p><em>"Microsoft Teams Now Uses up to 50% Less Power During Meetings"</em></p><p><br></p><p>Probably because many members of staff are now-able to return to work, so my guess would be there are now 50% fewer people on-average in each <em>Teams </em>meeting? ;)</p>
dftf
<p>Congratulations on the company-growth then… that’s certainly not been a widespread thing to occur during the pandemic. Most friends of mine have only seen job-losses during that time.</p><p><br></p><p>Oh, and also great to hear about the reduced print-outs, too. Again, another trend which I’m not aware I’ve ever seen anywhere I’ve worked at, well, ever. Printing remains as-popular-as-ever and the dream of a "paperless office" remains just that!</p>
dftf
<p>I’d hazard-a-guess <em>Teams</em> may only use the CPU for its video-rendering, not the GPU. And the video-codec they use would make a difference too, as some are more-efficient than others</p>